One of my "10 Ps" is Presence. Ray Bradbury once said that if you can put your reader into your character's skin, they'll believe anything. He meant that if you can make a reader see, hear, smell, feel, and taste the setting of your story, they will react to your story the same way your character would. That is what you want to accomplish. You want your reader to identify with your characters so well that they become them in a small way. And one of the pivotal ingredients in creating that identification is by turning on all of the reader's senses – and no, I'm not just talking about the usual five.
When you walk into a room, an awful lot happens that most people are completely ignorant of, but you as a writer better be picking up on every little thing that's going on. Let's say you walk into the foyer of an old house from its front porch. A poor writer would just say, "Ella walked into the foyer." But if you are going to put your reader into your character's skin, you have to include the pertinent info from the senses. First, if it's a bright afternoon, that foyer is going to be dark because old houses didn't have the large windows of today's houses. Why is that important to note? The character is going to have an emotional reaction to that difference. If you go from a bright day into a dark foyer, you're going to be blinking as your eyes adjust. You're going to be at a disadvantage because you'll be partially blind. If your story is about Ella the twelve-year old sneaking into someone's house, you bet that darkness will have an emotional impact on her. If Ella is a business woman who's come home to her parents' house for the first time in twenty years, again, that darkness will have meaning to her because she's entering a world that's insulated from her world. The symbolism can run amok here, but the important thing is that you are giving the reader that feeling of momentary blindness, and if you've been doing your job, the reader will have roughly the same emotional reaction that your character will have.
While getting the emotional reaction from your character, the darkness also gives crucial setting detail. It's an old house, and old houses didn't have the big windows of today's homes, so without even saying "it was an old house" or "it was a house with small windows," you've put the impression of an old house into the reader's head. Again, if you've been doing this all along in your story, you might never have to mention that the house is old because the reader will understand it from the myriad of similar details you've mentioned before, such as the feel of the dirt road that led to the house, the fact that the house's porch bends down on either side like a frown, etc. This is all part of my cardinal rule: Make everything do more than one thing. Pick the setting details that describe not only the environment, but also the character's emotions.
What else happens when you walk into that foyer? You smell it. Are you just going to describe the smell, or are you going to do dual-duty and make the description mean something? A recent classmate of mine described an old house's smell as one "before electricity and plastics and modern cleansers, even though it now had all those things." It worked wonderfully for me. I could smell the old wood and plaster of the house as well as the newer things that were now in it. And there was an emotional context of a lost age that was a theme in the story. There are the sounds of squeaky floorboards and the feel of the screen of the porch door moving under your palm, but you don't have to include every sense – just the ones that illustrate both the setting and the character. Too often writers will get carried away with their descriptions, which may be wonderful in themselves, but may be only taking up valuable space when the salient points have already been delivered.
The second part of putting your reader inside your character's skin has nothing to do with the physical senses, but with the character's attention. One of the fastest ways to yank your reader out of your character and out of the story is to force your character to look at something that the reader would not, at that time, be paying attention to. A novice writer several years back wrote about a man entering a room. The writer described the room in detail – certainly too much detail, but that wasn't the problem. The first thing he described was the eagle-head bust over the door. Think about it. You are walking into a new room for the first time; what is the first thing you take note of? Would it be something that is on the doorway behind you and above you? Do you usually walk into a room and quickly check the top of the door? The writer here was forcing his reader to turn around to do just that when the reader was really wondering, what and who is in this room?
This is ADD – Attention Direction Disorder. It happens all the time, and not just with scene descriptions. "Frank watched as Elissa took off her shirt and dropped it on the floor. It was one of those baggy, sweater things the color of a light rose. His neighbor had a whole hedge of roses that color, and Frank had always liked them." Um, excuse me, isn't there a topless woman standing in front of Frank? Unless that's part of the story, why is Frank's attention on the shirt and not on the nudity in front of him? If you were Frank, how much attention would you be giving that shirt? Unless your story is about how Frank is always a little disconnected from the world, you can't describe something that your character's attention is not going to be naturally on. If the woman strips out of her shirt, Frank's attention, and thus your reader's attention, and thus your attention, is going to be on the naked woman and what her nakedness means to your character. You have to write your descriptions in the same order they would demand the attention of your character.
If I were to be so bold, I'm going to modify Bradbury's adage. Give your reader the presence of your character. By that I mean put them in the skin of your character so that they see, hear, smell, and feel everything the character does, but go beyond the senses. Go beyond the skin of the character and into the character's state of presence. What does he see, hear, smell, and touch, but also let his emotional state, and his natural attention determine what he sees, hears, smells, and touches. The human brain takes in info from every one of your senses constantly, but it filters it down to the salient points so it's understandable to you. As an author, you are doing the same thing. You could describe every sensory perception in your world, but you have to filter out what to pass on to the reader (what is emotionally relevant to your character?), and in what order to pass it on (what is your character going to pay attention to next?).
Doing this gives your reader the feeling of presence that your character has, and as Bradbury says, once you've got your reader connected that deeply to your character, they'll believe (almost) anything.
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